The sky was flat and dark
Buildings empty, smears of light
People only gray blobs mostly talking on their phones
As he walked through miles of emptiness

The silence in his mind was the sound
After the door closed for the last time.

His stomach ached, his throat dry
Feet were sore and he couldn't stop
Until he came to the overpass,
The big freeway, 12 lanes of rushing lights
So many, many going somewhere to someone

He'd had one worry
What if he came and there were no cars
Just empty gray cement washed with neon

Well, all right!
The river of metal and light was unstopping
A waterfall of motion and urgency
He was grateful as he put one leg
Then the other over the railing

Falling into the highway of the night

it’s a winter night tonight
and I’m sitting in my room
in the warmest jacket
I could find
but my hands are
still frozen
and the darkness
seeps in from the
windows

I’ve given up trying
to argue with my
suffering,
I’m just sad
and with plenty of
good reason
too

but when I climb into bed
under a thick comforter
and still shiver
I wonder why
things haven’t changed
yet

I’m still alone
nearly seven months
later
I’ve found no one,
not even a fling
not even a friend
and each day it gets harder
to get up and smile into
the cold breeze

the stars have stopped
talking to me

the earth no longer
shows me her
beauty

I do not think I will
survive the winter
alone in the universe
like this

but that’s the lie
that I like to
tell myself

I will always survive

through  hell,
burning or freezing,
through apocalypse,
through upheaval,
through war,
through abandonments,
through destruction,
and even through
certain kinds of
death
I will still be here,
writing poems
for the darkness
of night
for no other reason
than to prove I existed
for one more
moment

like a soldier always marching
like an ant always building
like a tree always growing
like the world always churning
I am unstopping yet
not unyielding,
living, as I do,
in accordance with
the earth:

surviving,
if barely,
from each harsher winter
she puts before me
and always rising
greater than
before

Born into this world through pre-existing spirits
Discovering the world through all my spiritual rivets
Designing new paths over my ancestor's lives
We are walking alone in our desperate hives

My body filled with the spark and symmetry of fire and water
Guiding my soul through life for its purpose which might not matter
Seeking knowledge, love and lucidity on this mortal trail
Our legend forgotten and lost, completely off the rail

As we are kindred and divine
The life of a human holds the key to chime
I share my soul to be alive and free
Right as our history stretches up to greet thee
The future advances like an unstopping ocean
At my wake the sound of generations

The art of humanity conjuring up from our planes of life
The land in past and future being the essences of strife
In every plane exists nature, love and knowledge
A voice of voices, the voice of the world

I have walked alone and to the edge all of my life
My human mind like a vast ravine filling with knowledge
It shows me true compassion for karmic deserving, a life of college

A time to share your soul in water and land
Just another day to show the God of knowledge withstands
Human peace and understanding provides the answers
We are all seeking promise of divine ability to give us chances

We take our knowledge and lessons for the records of life and time
The moments coursing through my body like a silent mime
I am but a human with a life to climb

I have a scar on the bottom of my left thumb.
I got it
The day after you broke my heart the second time.
I was trying to open something with a knife
And it slipped.
It went straight in
Point first
Right at the joint between my thumb and the pad of my hand
That fleshy spot that is always stretching and wrinkling.
I was shocked at first- it went in deep
Almost two inches.
I suppose, maybe, I should have gotten stitches.
But what I did instead was pull the point out
pop
It made a small sound
Like I was unstopping a tiny bottle of wine.
In fact the hole in my hand
Remained clean and white and surprised
For a moment
Startled, I think, by its own existence.
And then it caught up to itself all at once
And bubbled up thick red blood
Faster than I expected it to.
Beads of it slid down my fingers.
Soon my hand was slick with it
Shaking
And I was still fascinated, transfixed,
Slow.
When the first drop hit the carpet
I figured I should go into the bathroom and let the tiles take the stains.
On the way there the world tilted a little
Since now I held in my cupped hand a small pool of red.
I resented my body's need for its own blood.
Its fragility.
It is so needy and so frail
And I have no patience for it.
On my knees on the smooth cold white floor
And then with my cheek pressed against it
To calm the fever of "shock"
I hated that my shell could steal my will.
I stood again in a moment
Having left a smudge on the floor
And my hand dripped
pat pat pat
Onto the tiles.
The smoothness of my own blood surprised me-
Its tendency to slip away and stand in pools.
Again I looked for a moment
And then ran my hand beneath the faucet
And marveled at the way the water was instantly crimson.
It kept running and running down the drain
And after a while I realized that it was unlikely to stop.
Lifting my now white hand
I peered at it
And there was the hole in it-
A perfect slit, deep and clean and filling up with dark sticky red fluid.
It overflowed again and I did my best to wrap it in bandages.
The bathroom looked like a ****** scene.
Who knew my hands
Held so much?
Who knew we were so easily punctured and drained?
It took a long time to heal.
I kept ripping it open by accident over and over
Because of its prime location in the crease of my hand.
It was weeks, really, before it actually did close.
And weeks more
Before it finally became less of an angry red
And more of a thick, shiny pinkish white.
It is raised.
It still hurts sometimes, even though it has been months healed.
I rather like it.
I like the gory proof of what I went through when you walked away.
It's just a small reminder,
A little white ridge and a tightness on my skin
But
Well
They say you don't know anything
Quite so well as the look of your own hands
And
I think it is appropriate that the landscape of mine
Was forever changed
When you left.

paper boats of hope running wet in the rains,

in the dimpled puddles closed, them odd schools

unstopping cheer

after that long hot season rain, rain


first we take off return in rain heavy rain

meetings and business and eating out wet

cloudy mourning before pale mornings,


then the lakes brimmed another spell

where the water flows, but we did not see,

too busy our lives, we did not see

Run
Running so fast
My legs unstopping
But the faces!
But the faces kept coming
Quicker
Bigger
Louder they came
Surrounding me
Enclosing me
They, trapping me
I am to late,
They've gotten me
Surely I am dead
As I wake up panting in my bed...

"I can stop whenever I want," I thought.

Days pass on in a blink or two, nights even lesser
Sometimes they linger to catch their breath
while the moon sails like a leaking, exhausted raft—
forever rowing, never moving— in a silent sea
And even if I could grab hold of the sky
and spin her till a peachy blush lit up her face
what good would it do to this melancholy land?

When a grief-stricken snake banged at my door, one stormy night,
I let him in for his toothless, shivering lips
—blue like cold himself—
became the very cause of my liquifying heart;
what could the piteous reptile be offered but
a chalice of fresh, steaming, crimson blood
He gave me his ruby smile and I tied it around my neck
How do you repay such love— how so
if not by surrendering your own doomed flesh?

Did I, or did I not
Roam about narrow alleys of ancient cities housed with words?
make home with wounded rugs left
in places even orphaned kittens avoided
—slept like an unborn child through sunless hours of dark's embrace
Swam through tireless waters—
with a pillowcase filled with tales
Crowned by impressed kings in some lands,
robbed by faceless folks in others.
Carried a plank or two when stories stopped earning me food

All worth another flip of the unheard page
Did I or did I not then forget it all—

As winter moved on to the land next door
sky stole away the very snow she had once abandoned;
lifted the frosty veil off her sun's flushed face
But even as fox gloves and lilies opened their arms,
I let the snake stay in my castle walls
sent out an army and fought wars against stars
when he said he deplored the light
He grew up fast, developed a habit of hissing—

And the neighbourhoods passed like ecstatic tides
left behind by unstopping ships

The moon keeps chasing his blooming sun,
never too far from her rays
and they kiss in the mornings and kiss in the dusks
And the sky steals quick glances at sea,
as he smiles knowingly
The snake fills up a goblet of wine,
feasting upon treys filled with meat—roasted and boiled and baked

And I stumble through empty streets, vomiting out all but him—
Vomiting out all that’s left of me—

"I can stop whenever you want," he whispers.

time-zone induced depth difference
           shifting weather patterns of the heart
                       unstopping rain in the wrong latitude
scent of a different wet earth
       thunder of a lonely soul
               lightning of lidded eyes
                      eyes, with 29 different names for tears
      heart-dew, soul-precipitation

cumulonimbus draws near the fluorescent tubes of existence
whispers of a war

Riverbank and sushi,
balmy air and sun.
Birdlife and people watching
with you, new one.
Conversation unstopping
sharing this and that,
winning smiles and glances.
You want no caveat.
You’re seeking smiles,
you’re seeking truth,
you’re seeking commonality.
With me. Let’s see.

To be practised are the things to better within myself, I must work my gifts
For if too long they lie there stagnant, eventually they'll be missed
It's been forever since I can remember a poem of mine with run-on lines
I can't remember to, mustn't, but I want to, reality's wrong but otherwise, I'm fine

Going about my daily lives, I strive to make me better than the best
Expectations of perfection, I can't care, I can never be less
Concerning all that I am learning, getting, being, staying here
Hides an appreciation of my disassociations, my delusions, don't hug me, I am scared

It's been a while since I last smiled at a prose of mine made out of deliberation
A fever dream, I scream through my glass casket to a denying nation
Let me out, it festers, a pest, I confess to the caging of a tiger
Repression, antidepressants, suppressed, well sedated, I'm deduced, I am a, the liar

I live to love, I hate to live, but love, a reality, people nonexistent
No matter what happens, as things get out of hand, it stands, the maddening's consistent
Can't see the wrong, just as I'm taught, you awaken, to fix the mixed, you're seeking
Asleep I lie, waiting to die, everything's alright is all I see, I be to once denied, unwanted memories, unstopping, ever fleeting

Of course it is my fault, as usual

It's apparent a parent would glare at their transparent impairments. A viral mimicry, a parrot, coughing into their coffin, barfing leads to causing unstopping hand washing. Watching the currently conceived serene scene to see if they been seen. Stop it.

Struggling with-
a fakir's heart, at random
fall, remembering a reverie
in quest for unstopping
in your home.

It was not a personal
guilt to modify the echoes
to let go the original voice of
the shelter.

Not believing in-
a parasol, I asked the moon,
why the sky was crying?
Walking alone in the
valley of dolls, I
assemble the broken watch
of faultless decisions.

Time was up and you sing
in honey-trap of life.